French rights icon Simone Veil to be given rare Pantheon burial

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July 5, 2017 1:21 PM

Her biggest political achievement was pushing through a law to legalise abortion in France in 1974 in the face of fierce opposition.

French President Emmanuel Macron pays his respects to the flag-draped coffin of Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, during a tribute ceremony at the Invalides in Paris, on July 5, 2017

French Holocaust survivor and rights icon Simone Veil, who died last week aged 89, will receive the rare honour of a burial in the Pantheon, President Emmanuel Macron announced at her funeral Wednesday.

Veil will become only the fifth woman to be buried in the Paris monument, which houses the remains of great national figures, and only the fourth to be interred there on her own merits.

She will join Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie; two French Resistance members who were deported to Germany, Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion; and Sophie Berthelot, who was buried alongside her chemist husband Marcellin Berthelot.

Veil was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 while still a teenager.

She survived the concentration camps that claimed the lives of her mother, father and brother, and went on to become an indefatigable crusader for women's rights and European reconciliation.

Several hundred dignitaries, relatives and friends attended her funeral Wednesday at the Invalides military hospital and museum in Paris.

Macron said he had decided to honour her with a place in the Pantheon to show "the immense gratitude of the French people to one of its most loved children."

Among the other luminaries buried there are writers Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola.

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